Texans may be hiding weaknesses

Their record is 10-1 but for the second consecutive week, Houston's defense looked awfully shaky.Kirthmon F. Dozier/Detroit Free Press/MCT

Forget the final score for a moment or that the Houston Texans may still earn a first-round bye in the injury-plagued AFC.

Four days after allowing over 300 yards passing to Jaguars backup quarterback Chad Henne, the Texans allowed over 300 in just three quarters yesterday in Detroit against Matthew Stafford and the Lions.

The same defense that allowed only 28 points over a three-week span in late October and early November suddenly looks vulnerable, begging the question: Are the Texans out of gas or have injuries depleted them to the point where they are no longer the team that dominated the AFC in the first half of the season?

Linebackers Brooks Reed and Bradie James went down yesterday, the fourth and fifth Texans defensive starters to be sidelined. The biggest name on that list is linebacker Brian Cushing, who may be as valuable as Defensive Player of the Year candidate J.J. Watt.

Maybe Gary Kubiak’s squad will be able to overcome these losses in one of the league’s weaker divisions. Maybe, like the Giants, Houston is simply going through a November swoon.

But more realistically, a year after seeing their Super Bowl hopes go up in flames when quarterback Matt Schaub went down, the Texans have to be feeling a sense of déjà vu as a special season threatens to come apart at the seams at the worst possible time.

REVIEW THE UNREVIEWABLE: Everyone has their special holiday wish. Mine is that five words be taken out of every NFL official’s vocabulary.

“The play is not reviewable.”

How many times have we heard it, when an official makes an egregious error by blowing a whistle too quickly, or as was the case in the second half yesterday in the Houston-Detroit game, not at all?

Major mess-up? Irrelevant. The official’s word is final. Clear to everyone in the world? No matter. It can’t be changed. And what about penalizing challenges when plays were going to be reviewed anyway? How is that fair?

In major American professional sports, there is no system more flawed than the NFL review protocol. The good: issuing two challenges per team, which can become three if a team challenges correctly twice. But being unable to correct so many obvious wrongs by using simple judgment is unacceptable, a violation of the integrity of the game through sheer stubbornness.

The argument against more overturned calls? It would slow down the game. But this is where the league is guilty of talking out of both sides of its collective mouth. If NFL officials are correct virtually all of the time, wouldn’t such calls be so infrequent as to make a minimal difference in the time of game?

And how difficult would it be to mirror the judgment of Major League Baseball’s umpires?
For example, a runner fumbles, the opposition recovers, but the play is blown dead.

Under the current rules, the defensive team would receive the ball where it was recovered, negating any return yardage.

Why not make this play the equivalent of the ground-rule double ruling, assessing return yardage based on judgment?

If the defender was down, it’s obvious. But if they scoop the ball up on the dead run and no offensive player is within 10 yards, yardage must be added to the return.

Given our current technology, errors can be fully corrected. We can make more educated guesses. The game doesn’t have to settle for half-truths.